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for a long time now I've been wanting to shoot an episode where I distill over 20 years of my life experience trying to figure out life I've been at it for about 20 years like really trying to figure out life distill all of that down into the most powerful the most potent advice tips and wisdom that you need if you were like a newborn if you were just dropped on this planet let's say you weren't a baby you were dropped on this planet as an adult let's just imagine hypothetically and you needed to figure out like what to do in life how to live forget all the kids stuff forget all the toys and all that how do you actually live life what is life about what do you really need to know to ace life so let's talk about that oh man the the problem with with shooting such an episode and giving such advice is that there's just so much I almost imagine like shooting it as though like to to my future son let's say I pass away whatever and then my son at one point just like sits down and watches one video like what do I got it what do I got to tell you in the next hour to to to make a different the most difference in your life so let's look at it like that and then yeah the trick with it is where do we begin there there's so much there's so much perhaps the first thing you should know about life is that life needs to be lived to be understood we're born almost like blank slates knowing nothing we're born completely ignorant and then we get bombarded by life life is not a theoretical pursuit life is here it's embodied you're in it you're feeling it there's pain there suffering there's intense pleasure and joy and everything in between it's the full range and there's so much going on and is so enormous it's so enormous that most people it takes him a long time if ever that they realize the enormity of what life is and I'm not even going into some deep metaphysical topics yet I'm just talking about ordinary even ordinary human life it's still it's enormous there's so much to do in life so much to learn so much to explore so many mistakes to make so many traps to fall into and perhaps that's where we should start is with the notion of traps there are many many many traps that you will be falling into in life if you're not careful and really the point of this conversation right now is that I want to point out to you the most serious traps the most common traps that people fall into and there's hundreds there's thousands of these traps so I won't be able to enumerate them all for you but I will point out the most important ones the deepest ones this is the kind of stuff that they're not gonna teach you in school so we'll be explaining many many traps over the next hour to as I'm talking so just keep that notion of traps in the back of your mind already just just having that one idea of Oh life is filled with traps I got to be careful that already is is a really powerful concept to keep in the back of your mind as you're going through life in various situations now that's not to make you paranoid and to make you afraid of every situation that that would also that itself would be a trap fear is of is one of the biggest traps but we'll get to that so I'm not I'm not saying it from love to make you paranoid I'm just saying there are many traps there are many ways to screw up life but also life has enormous potential so one of the things you should know is that life can get really really bad much worse than you could ever imagine and life can get really really good much better than you could ever imagine so the spectrum because life is so enormous the spectrum is really really wide and it's not a one-dimensional spectrum or even a two-dimensional spectrum it's multi-dimensional and that's also something you should know about life is that life is multi-dimensional there are so many dimensions to it that's what makes it complex life is enormous ly complex there's no simple five minute advice that I could give you there's no simple one book that can be read that will teach you all the stuff you got to know there it's it's it's massive its sprawling there are so many variables and one of the biggest variables depends upon who you are so see to live a good life what's you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to both learn and figure out how life works but also learn and figure out how you work and how you fit into life and nobody can tell you that because you're uniquely you you're different from other people you're different from me now I can give you general guidelines general wisdom general advice of course there's much we have in common but in the end you got a customized life to you to make it really work for you I don't know all of your ins and outs sometimes I make assumptions about how you're similar to me you might be different than me in important ways and so the first rule is you got to really be true to yourself be willing to honor your uniqueness and to figure out life for yourself you see you got a wonder at some point why am i alive why am I here at all am I just here to repeat somebody else's life am I just here to live the same life that might lived that my teachers lived that might church leader lived that my ancestors lived or am I here to do something new and what I'm suggesting to you is that you're here to do something new reality and the universe is a deeply intelligent thing don't take it for something stupid it doesn't just repeat itself over and over and over again generation after generation after generation what you see if you observe society from a big-picture perspective is you see society evolving every generation is different and new and figuring out new challenges in life discovering new opportunities new potentials that can be actualized and so on life never stands still and so now you're here and one of the biggest things you should be asking yourself now is why am I here what am I here to do and don't look for that answer to come from somebody else like your parents or your teachers or your church leaders to tell you why you're here and what you need to do but turn inwards and that's one of the biggest secrets of life is spend more time reflecting and turning inwards and really asking yourself deep questions about life rather than reading them or trying to get them from other people which brings us to perhaps the biggest trap of all in life and that is the trap of ideology and the trap of falling into belief systems that other people have invented see because you're born like a blank slate your mind is pure it's clean when you're first here but then very quickly as you see in order to survive in life and that's what life is it's a process of survival we'll talk more about that in a minute that's very important but uh in order for you to survive you need to quickly learn lessons quickly pickup lesson after lesson after lesson when you're young you're forced to do this and of course your mind is so open it's such an open slate that almost anything can be written on it it's almost like a blank piece of paper or a blank canvas but you're born into a society and human beings as you've probably already noticed are very social species everything we do we do in a society you're not an individual you're part of a larger super organism your city your country your culture the world the human species your family unit your religious group the scientific community if you're a part of that whatever the language you use all of these are social institutions and tools and inventions and so the challenge is is is that the individual and the collective are so intertwined if you're a human that it's both a blessing and a curse it's a blessing in the sense that Society allows you so many cool things technology and various comforts of living that you get entertainment and and interesting cultural stuff cultural artifacts art and reading you can tap into the collective wisdom of hundreds of generations of humans that came before you so you don't have to figure life all out from scratch by yourself yet on the other hand if what you do is you just blindly let yourself be programmed by your culture by society by your religious group or even by the scientific community then your mind is going to get filled with belief systems and ideologies and these will seriously rob you of your happiness and your potential to use your mind - really ace life and so trap number one is falling into ideologies and belief systems and taking those as dogma and then defending those and fighting over those and debating those and getting involved in this ideological game whether it's with religion with science with atheism with politics with economics with gender identity with philosophy with cosmology with spirituality with various kinds of New Age belief systems whatever it is the number one trap is getting your mind locked into one of these belief systems because these belief systems are like the operating system upon which the rest of your life will hinge the operating system then dictates what kind of software can run in that environment what kind of apps you could install and load and how they work see so the real work here is making sure that you're not working at the surface level of changing the apps rearranging the apps on your computer but that you're working at a deeper level of looking at the internal workings of the operating system and making sure that you're not limited or straitjacketed by some operating system some ideology some paradigms and belief system and then even going deeper we're gonna get even deeper we're gonna get to the kernel level or you even pick apart the the the heart - the kernel of the operating system and you get to the to the very root to the nugget of the whole thing how it all works and then that will take us into metaphysics and spirituality but let's not get ahead of ourselves yet so the quality of your life is gonna directly hinge on the quality of your mind and how you use your mind see this is one of the things that separates humans the most from animals is that animals live a very physical embody existence whereas us humans the most important things we do is how we use our minds this is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness we can get trapped in our minds and completely lost to the point where we become suicidal in the worst-case scenario or even start going insane mentally unstable or we can develop a sharp clear mind and learn to use it effectively to learn lessons about life and to master life and to construct the kind of life that we want and it all depends on how you use your mind see for animals that's not so important but for humans is very important and we're living in a society where in our society the people who earn the most money and are the most successful in our society they are not manual labourers they are not construction workers they are the deep thinkers they are the strategists they are the political leaders they are the visionaries the inventors the creators this is all coming from the mind so whatever you do in your life master your mind and most of the traps that I was talking about are gonna be traps of your own mind see your greatest enemy is not out there somewhere it's not somebody else it's yourself and that's one of the biggest lessons that you need to understand really early to learn in life is that there's nobody out there to blame for what's happening in your life if you want to ace life you need to take responsibility and ownership for your own mind and how you're using your mind and to start to notice that by introspecting you can see how your own mind is contributing to the kind of results that you're getting in your life and so if there's something in your life that you're not happy with you're not getting the kind of emotions you want the kind of love you want the kind of material success you want rather than blaming somebody or creating a story an ideology about how you're being victimized or how life is unfair and so forth always especially when it's difficult especially when you want to blame somebody else especially when you feel victimized especially when you feel like you've been wronged turn even deeper within and ask yourself how can I take ownership over this situation and how is my mind playing a part in these results that I'm getting that's gonna be your ticket out see you can either be blaming others or you can take ownership and then look for a way to to change the situation and I recommend you take that second option now the trick is that the mind oftentimes doesn't want to look inwards it likes to project outwards and another trick is that reality is such a weird and twisted thing that it seems as though we're in a physical material tangible world here where there are tangible facts you could knock on a wall it's made out of solid concrete or whatever and that's just a fact you can't do anything about it and there are many such facts in the world and we have to kind of deal with this and that the world it seems like the world is a costing you from the outside stuff is happening to you and then you're just sort of forced to juggle the balls as best as you can this is in fact an illusion and one of the most important things you got to understand about life is a your mind is projecting and creating reality it is not simply that there is a reality and you were born into it no your mind is interwoven with physical reality itself in such a way that your thoughts and emotions and your belief system and your ideology all of this it's all creating the kind of reality that you see out there there's many layers to it okay so right now you may not understand how you're creating a wall or how you're creating a house or a tree these physical objects and for most people they have no idea how they're creating it and they never will because they're at a level of consciousness where they can't access that but there actually are levels of consciousness where you can become start to become conscious of how you're even manifesting physical objects let alone various problems in your life and so forth now of course now we're getting into some complex territory getting ahead of ourselves here but just understand that your mind is interwoven with physical reality itself you don't know exactly how that works yet it's a complex process it's not so simple it doesn't just simplistically mean that all well I can just think a million dollars and here it is it's not that simple it's a lot more complicated than that but your mind is intertwined with physical reality and so the world you see is not just a world that existed before you and that now you're inside of it but rather your mind is playing an active creative role not just in how your personal life unfolds but if we're getting to that sort of kernel of the operating system we want to go really deep your mind is generating reality but this of course requires a much more nuanced and complex notion of mind then most people in your culture in your society would have you believe so you see here's the real trick with understanding life is that if you're gonna try to understand life by simply subscribing to various kinds of belief systems that others give you you will never fully understand how life works and you will forever be at the effect of it its victim and you will get stuck in various kinds of belief systems and ideologies and you will be incapable of really grasping what life is so one of my pieces of advice for you is that you start to take the process of learning and understanding extremely seriously your job here in life is not to screw around and to have fun and to watch TV and play video games and eat good food and all that sort of stuff you can do all those things I'm not denying any of those to you you can enjoy all the pleasures of life so what I teach my philosophy is not some hardcore ascetic philosophy where you deny yourself all the pleasures no not at all enjoy the pleasures but realize that those are all desserts those are all secondary tertiary and even further down the list sort of things your first priority should be understanding and learning if you can if you can nail understanding and learning that's gonna be the master key that unlocks everything else for you every other domain in life that's what you'll discover and if you don't get a handle on learning and understanding then how will you ever understand what life is how will you ever understand all of its subcomponents and sub domains you won't and by not understanding it you're gonna act like a fool thinking you understand something that you don't really understand oversimplifying things and then getting yourself into trouble see you think you understand how you're gonna generate happiness in your life so you go do some heroin or some drugs and then you discover all that you get trapped in that and then through a painful process you discover that your understanding of how happiness works was completely backwards which is why you went for the drugs and then you you have to return make a painful turn out of them to find true happiness you see but why did that whole process happen it's because you didn't have enough depth of understanding of what happiness is and how to get it this is just but one example this understanding or this this learning this this will this will be something that you'll be doing for the rest of your life and it's important you start as soon as possible to start understanding reality at deeper and deeper levels as soon as possible try to independently for yourself understand everything you come into contact with are you inside of a house try to understand what a house is how is it built where did it come from are you walking down the street and walking through a park try to understand what a park is where trees come from how they grow what they do what their function on the planet is are you in a relationship with some friend try to understand what a relationship is wonder about that try to understand the dynamics of relationships are all relationships the same or are they different is there a difference between man man relationships versus man-woman relationships sexual relationships versus platonic relationships see friendships versus boss worker or boss employee relationships what kind of common factors are there between different relationships and through this process everything that you're interacting with life try to recognize that if you're new here it's all foreign to you you're learning it for the first time you have no idea what anything is and one of the greatest mistakes you can make is just to take other people's words for what things are you need to cultivate an attitude of independence of mind where you are independently curiously thinking through what things are for yourself of course you can read books and you can watch videos and you can take advice from others like myself but ultimately you're going to have run all that through your own independent intellect even this advice that I'm giving you right now how do you know it's true how do you know it's good how do you know I'm not leading you into a trap how do you know I don't have some ulterior motive you don't know so what do you do in this case do you turn off the recording and then not listen to some good advice no you have to think through it and work through it yourself that's why you're here that's why you were born is to figure all this stuff out there's a bunch of different puzzles here and you're figuring them out every single day every single year of your life you're being faced with new challenges new puzzles and you got to be figuring it out whereas most people most of your friends and colleagues and family members they're gonna be lazy they're not gonna want to go through the intellectual work of trying to understand things at a deep level they're gonna be satisfied with surface level understanding of things and that's how they get trapped so how do you go about understanding well questioning questioning is perhaps the number one key there start questioning everything leave nothing unquestioned leave no stone unturned question religion question science question philosophy question school question your elders question your teachers your parents your co-workers your friends those beneath you those over you question politicians question those in power question the military question the medical system question society and question yourself questioning seems very simple but it will get you very far questioning is what activates your mind to work in penally so asked higher-quality questions and constantly be contemplating what life is and how it works there will be a lot of people who will want to tell you all the answers unfortunately life can't work that way you have to discover the answers it's not a matter of getting the answer the point of questioning is not per se to get the answer it's to go through the process of the questioning and the thinking through it if I just give you some answer but you haven't gone through the process of deriving it yourself you're not gonna get the value from it it's just gonna go in one ear and out the other sometimes to get an answer to a deep question about life might take you 5 10 20 years of work questioning contemplating of curiosity of passion speaking of which I should I guess point out a couple of other key pillars that are very important for life curiosity develop a curiosity about everything be curious look at how amazing this thing called reality is don't just take it for granted and don't just assume that you understand what it is you don't act as though you are the first human who is ever born and that you're discovering all of life for the first time cuz in a sense that is how it feels from your point of view so be curious about everything this is what will drive you to buy books to watch videos to listen to recordings to take courses to constantly be learning don't let learning be some dry stale process that only happens in school or during homework time learning is something you got to be passionate about this is why you're here this is why you're alive is to be learning whatever they're teaching you in school that's a mockery of the learn process sure it's still necessary and it's still good there's gonna be a lot of important stuff you learn at school and I recommend you take school seriously you don't slack off and play games they're too much but but what really matters is that you become your own lifelong learner and educator be passionate about teaching yourself about how life works through questioning through independently going out there and reading books not just the books that your teachers assign you but the books that you're interested in study the subjects you're interested in which brings us to the other pillar which is passion what is the point of living life if you're not going to be passionate about it yet as obvious as that sounds when you look around you and the older you get the more you're gonna see this you're gonna see more and more of your co-workers and friends and family members living listless passionless lives where the passion has been robbed of them they've been robbed of their passion and somewhere along the way they lost their passion for life or maybe they never even developed it these people take life for granted and that really is the worst thing you can do with life is to take it for granted you're here something amazing is going on it's a mystery you don't really know what it is now start learning start discovering start being curious and start being passionate and of course that leads us to the next huge chunk of life advice which is have something in your life that you're deeply passionate about multiple things in fact you should be so passionate about life that it's hard for you to choose which handful of things to be passionate about because your passion is endless and sprawling but nevertheless you have to hone your passion down to find a few things that you want to devote your life to and the sooner you can find this in your life the better this is gonna be the foundation of your life and basically all of the advice I'm giving here is gonna be the foundation of your life but really without passion you're not gonna be motivated you're not gonna be motivated to get up in the morning and to do the work that needs to be done you're gonna be lazy you're just gonna go through the motions of living life you're gonna turn into a zombie so start pursuing the stuff that makes you passionate and passion is like a snowball it starts very slow starts rolling down the hill and it builds and builds and builds and builds and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows so it's important that you find something that you're going to devote a significant chunk of your time to a significant chunk of your life to you're both passionate about that you have maybe some skill or some talent in and that you're interested in working on because hey you're here and life is a function of survival everyone in life no matter what they're doing they're surviving they're surviving in different unique ways so you're gonna have to be surviving too doesn't matter who you are you're gonna have to have some kind of job anytime to have do some kind of work I recommend you find a job and work on your terms rather than on somebody else's terms create a career for yourself not just a job a career for yourself and even beyond a career but a life purpose for yourself something that's gonna be the fuel for the rest of your life that explains why you're going to work and somehow ties in with your deepest passions about life it could be music it could be film it could be video games it could be writing it could be art it could be politics it could be science it could be Benison it could be a million things it makes no difference what it is as long as it suits you and that's coming back to the very first point that I made is it you got a customized life for you nobody can tell you whether you should be a lawyer or a doctor or a scientist or an engineer or a programmer or an artist or a movie director only you can know that pick the thing that you're really really passionate about and to find those things you got to go and explore life a little bit if you're sitting there and you're saying well I got nothing I'm passionate about that's because first of all you're taking life for granted there's a ton of things to be passionate about but you're so taking life for granted so stop doing that get really curious go start exploring life see all the potential that's out there and then as you're doing that stuff will resonate with you stuff will move you it'll make you emotional maybe you watch your movie it makes you emotional good go down that road you're getting some kind of emotional response there some kind of passion is coming up maybe you play a video game that stirs up some passion maybe you watch some science documentary that serves up some passion you maybe you see somebody being a doctor and that stirs up some passion you whatever that is start exploring those things and start start following your passions without that you're gonna have a law of miserable life because you're gonna be working roughly from the age of 20 to the age of 65 at least if you don't work on your terms Society will force you to work there's no escaping work you're gonna have to work in life not only are you gonna have to work you're probably gonna have to work 40 hours a week for a good 45 years at least maybe more that's gonna be a giant chunk of your time we're talking about a third of your life a third of your waking hours maybe even half or more of your waking hours will be devoted to work so it just makes sense that you want to have a lot of passion in your work you want to feel like your work is meaningful and meaning is not something else found out they are meaning is something you create again remember like I said your mind and reality are intertwined so passion is not just something that comes to you from outside passion something you can generate you can learn to generate it it's about how your mind interacts with reality if your mind is listless than and lazy and you expect just passion to hit you from outside well you might never find it that way but if you're proactive and you're going out there looking for it with curiosity and questioning that is going to help attract the passion to you you're gonna actually create it you're gonna generate it see desire and ambition are very important aspects of living a good life now of course sometimes people demonize desire is a bad thing but there's many different levels and qualities of desire there's low quality desires like the desire for heroin and there's very high quality desires like the desire to be selfless so it's it's really a question of purifying the quality of your desire and the magical thing about reality and here's one secret that you can use to really create any kind of life you want is that desire is far more important than knowing how to do something so maybe you desire to be a doctor but you have no idea how to be a doctor it might seem like that's a big problem and it might seem that well yeah I have my desire but but the desire what is desire it's just some subjective emotional feeling some emotions some fluffy stuff it's not tangible you can't really bank on it it's not physical or concrete and then you know being a doctor that's like real skill and that's like you have a job and somebody pays you good money for that like that's a tangible thing but all the tangible things in life whether it's money houses sexual partners marriages children you know all the tangible stuff in life that you might want really it all begins with desire desire is how you get it and if you think about it when you enter life you have no idea how life works but you learn along the way how do you learn through a desire to get a thing accomplished how did you learn how to walk you had a desire to go across the room maybe to grab some candy or whatever or just to peek out the window and then how did you learn to move your legs did someone teach you that someone tell you did you read an instruction manual did it matter that you didn't know how to move your legs did you sit there and you say to yourself all man I'm such I'm so depressed because I don't know how to move my legs no it's that desire that pushed you that ambition you had ambition that pushed you to want to start walking and then running and then jumping and doing all the other stuff and that's gonna just keep going and expanding further in your life as long as you Stoke up that ambition and that desire and you make sure it's a high-quality one that's what you're using as your engine to drive your life if you don't have passion and abyssion and desire in your life you have no engine you have no motivation to do anything you're just gonna go with the flow and you're just gonna get this the default the status quo and the status quo is just what everybody else has around you it's not going to be very exciting it's not going to be very interesting it's gonna be rather miserable you're gonna be going to a boring job doing boring work for some boring person contributing perhaps even in harmful and evil waste to the world so one of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself remember going back to that piece of advice about being really good about questioning and also the advice about introspecting ask yourself the question constantly what do I want what do I desire out of life what am i passionate about how can I be more passionate about life because really it's quite simple do you want a passionate life or not those are your like two only choices you're either going to get one or the other and if you're not proactively pursuing a passionate life you're gonna by default get a passionless life it's pretty simple this isn't rocket science for me my passion and ambition and desire stems from a deep metaphysical sense that life is something precious that my life is important not in any kind of egotistical sense that I think that all I have some important person not in that sense fully I fully recognize that life is an illusion and that all meaning is self generated and I've recognized this since I was a child all right so if you think that life has some ultimate meaning grounded in some one thing it doesn't life's meaning is whatever you create it to be you are the creator of your life's meaning so if you believe that life has no meaning that's what you'll create and that's what you'll get and then you'll probably be depressed and nihilistic and you probably won't have much fun if you believe that life is very meaningful if you believe it's very meaningful to save other people's lives by working in an emergency room as a doctor then that's what you'll create that will be your life and if you believe it's meaningful to sit on a computer all day and you know post away on the internet then that's what she'll do you'll find that meaningful and that will be your life and if you believe it's meaningful to read books then that's the kind of life you'll create for yourself see now is it really meaningful this is a silly question there's no such thing as really meaningful meaningful is whatever you say it is and of course what others around you say it is too so of course your culture in your society plays a big role as well and of course there's things that your body requires their survival demands for humans and so of course that that appears meaningful to us but but this leads us into the next point which is now we're starting a little bit more metaphysical is that reality is subjective it's a subjective thing it's not like a physical object found somewhere in the universe that's not reality reality is a subjective thing you're living through it don't let the scientists and materialists convince you otherwise be in touch with your feelings be in touch with how reality feels don't just think about reality it might seem like I'm telling you to question it your introspect a lot which puts you a lot into your kind of cerebral mind and that's important but uh but but know your mind includes not just thinking it includes feeling and in fact getting in touch with your feelings and your intuitions is far more important than just thinking and this is one of those aspects that mainstream society and school won't teach you is how to feel deeper really spend a lot of time feeling feel physical objects feel emotions feel the difference between anger and sadness and frustration and depression and sexual arousal and different kinds of sexual arousal start to draw find distinctions and degrees recognize find degrees between these different things and many many more feel everything even just when you walk into a room into a building how does it feel to you what is your intuition telling you connect with your intuition that intuition it seems sometimes like is a fluffy Airy fairy thing Society will tell you that intuition is its you can't bank on it it's not scientific enough it's not reasonable it's not logical but intuition will get you a lot further in life than just cold reason and logic will your heart is where your passion comes from it's where your love for life comes from and love is still an important topic we have yet to scratch the surface of but like I was saying I would have been on tangent my passion for life comes from sort of a deep metaphysical sense and really is a spiritual sense that something incredible is going on with reality and by which I mean reality itself is an incredible thing and if you just tuned in for a second that you exist just tuned into the fact that you were born is you think you are you were born conventionally-speaking you exist here you are you're a part of reality or participating in the subjective experience of reality just like turn inwards for a moment put your awareness on that and just kind of go whoa how did I even get here it's a miracle that I was even born so by connecting with that sense then the next step for me in my thinking process is I say well wow it's incredible with this this reality that I'm that I'm here it's incredible I'm not quite sure what it is it's amazing it's beautiful look at how beautiful everything is it seems to work in an intelligible way it's not just a hodgepodge of random crap that's happening there's a sort of consistency and in order to it reality is highly ordered this order can be studied and understood which is why we're talking at all here so there seems to be sort of logic to reality but but at the same time we're not really sure like where's reality going where is life going what's the point of it so these are very high-quality open questions you can keep questioning these for years and you'll you'll go down the right path as you keep questioning all this yeah just recognize how amazing it is to be alive it's a rare gift to be alive it's a rare gift and you got to wonder in the back of your mind like why was I the lucky one why was I chosen to be here because you can imagine that you might I've been born at all you were that lucky egg and that lucky sperm that that met combined together and then here's you from that process at least that's what science tells us so let's just go with that for now but still you know there's your your mom has hundreds and maybe thousands of eggs your dad has millions and billions of sperm what are the odds that they meet and then you come out of it and here you are especially if you have decent health if your body's not disfigured and 'disformed deformed I mean then hey look how lucky you are if you live in a relatively decent country not in some war zone look how lucky you are if you don't have some terrible disease or cancer look how lucky you are if you come from a decent family where you weren't terribly abused physically and emotionally look how lucky you are but even if you have some of those things and some of those are holding you back and I know that some of you do and some of you you know suffer from those things that's okay too it's just you're gonna have a little harder time and and that's fine you know one of the biggest lessons you have to learn about life is that you have to deal with the hand that you've been dealt like in poker right you don't get to choose which cards you're dealt sometimes you're dealt some crummy cards and part of the challenge of life is rolling with those punches and figuring it out anyways so make a commitment to always be figuring it out and sometimes life will get really challenging and you'll be thrown a curveball but you gotta like commit to really living a good life which I guess ties it all together here you know once you recognize that your life is precious that it's this amazing miraculous thing then you ask yourself okay so I've been given this miracle of life whereas others don't have it I've been given the miracle of relatively decent health that maybe others don't have I've got I'm ahead of me I've got 30 40 50 years whatever left of my life 80 years you know maybe some of you what's worthwhile to do if life is a miracle if life is amazing and I've been blessed with it what is my obligation my obligation is to make the most of my life so your question is how do I live a good life that should be one of the top questions on your list of questions to ask and this is not a question you asked once or twice this is a question you asked for the next 40 years of your life how do I live a good life what do I desire what is worthwhile doing what is meaningful to me what do I want out of life not what my parents want from me or what my teachers tell me or what my culture wants for me but what do I want and to know what you want this gets back to the to that point about feeling you see you can't just logically think through what my passion should be it's like well should I be a doctor or Laura let me logically way the to let me see how much does a lawyer earn how much does the doctor ernõ all of the lawyer earns more and how many hours does doctor work doctor or thought okay so did we just tally all that up and then we say okay lawyer is the best one say no you got to feel it you see you got to intuit it you got to be connected with your heart not just with your logical left hemisphere you can't just be analyzing life all the time you got a deeply connect with what moves you because what moves you in the end is not logic its emotion and here I'll point out a really common trap that many people fall into these days in the 21st century in the developed world is we're hyper logical science has been very successful in the last couple hundred years has produced a lot of technology there's a lot we could say about science but science has some dangers with it one of the dangers of science is that it over analyzes everything it looks upon reality as a physical material object to be dissected and deconstructed in an objective manner detached from it dissociated from it see the scientist ideally in a scientist mind the scientist thinks that the best way to understand reality is to be separate from reality the scientist almost wants to extract himself out of the universe and then look down upon the universe and as though like through a microscope and study it at a distance not himself being involved with the subject that he's studying at all and this works in certain narrow situations you know if you want to study some bacteria in a petri dish you can do it that way safely at a distance but life itself notice life is not safely at a distance life is the exact opposite that it's completely you and your body and your mind enmeshed with physical reality such that the two can't be even separated from each other the object and the subject are one you are here and you are connected right you're plugged right into life you're plugged right into reality so when I cut you with a knife you feel it you can't act like a scientist some distance removed where you might take a knife and cut off your arm and then take your arm and then and then study it under a microscope and then maybe eat it for dinner that's what life would be like if the scientists were right if life was purely logical and analytical but it's not and the trap is trying to treat reality as though logic is the ultimate lens through which to understand reality it's not logic is highly highly limited and in fact logic is easily abused and misused to justify any kind of ideology or belief system like I talked about before logic becomes its own trap now of course emotions can also become huge traps so there's no easy answers here and that's other lesson about life is that life is is highly complex there are no simple answers usually it's it's a delicate balancing act there's no one clear right path or one clear answer about what you should do or how you should behave or what you should be passionate about or what's right and what's wrong or what's good and what's evil there are no clear answers to these things that's what makes life so interesting if it was just black and white and simple what would be the point of living it you see so don't want it to be simple in black and white learn to love the complexity the complexity gives you grist for the mill of your mind you have something to learn something to study something to figure out you have a bunch of puzzles to solve in life see that makes life interesting emotions are more powerful than logic even the most logical people in the world who will try to tell you that their philosophy and attitude towards life is all logical in reality their life is run 95% by emotions 5% by logic emotions are what moved people emotions are more fundamental than logic and then thinking emotions drive your sexual behavior emotions drive your what you eat what you don't eat what you like what you don't like who you're willing to sleep with who you're not willing to sleep with what you're scared of what you're not scared of when you're pissed off at somebody and emotions save your life when you're walking through the forest and a bear jumps out at you you get scared and you run away saves your life that's why emotions are more powerful than logic because with logic you just be standing there thinking about like oh that's a bear let me analyze this bear all--it's is it a brown bears and a black bear is this bear is the fast Bears or slow bears you can attack me no no you just feel fear and you run and that saves your life if you were analyzing for five minutes there the bear would eat you see so get out of your head and more into your body feel yourself if you don't feel good in your body if you don't feel good about your life no amount of logic and no amount of external conditions will do it for you because in the end what do you want you want to be satisfied and you want to be happy and you want to be passionate that's what you really want out of life that's what constitutes a good life now of course the details of that will vary person to person but that's generally what every person wants but notice those are emotional things satisfaction happiness peace of mind these are these are emotional things they're not logical things see so if you can't feel good in your body you can't ever be happy and if you try to approach life from this dissociated place where you are like back here then there's a glass wall over here and then there's life over there and you're trying to live it at a distance this is also you people who do that they really do that because they're afraid of feeling life and of course that's totally understandable because sometimes life can feel shitty there can be a lot of deep suffering and pain but here's one of my pieces of advice for you when you're suffering and you will be suffering a lot that's guaranteed you will be suffering a lot when you're suffering when you're feeling bad lonely sad depressed angry jealous mm-hmm and any other negative emotion rather than numbing yourself or distracting yourself have the courage to feel into that more deeply a common trap that people fall into a life without even recognizing it is that they they think that well I want the positive emotions but I don't want the negative ones so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna feel the positive ones and then suppress deny ignore and numb out the negative ones huge mistake huge mistake actually what you need to do counter-intuitively is you need to feel deeper into the negative emotions that will allow you then to become good at feeling in general that will allow you to then feel deeper into the positive emotions as well suppression and denial and ignoring things this is not the attitude you want to take towards life this is the wrong approach stuff that you deny or suppress or sweep under the rug in life it will always come back to haunt you it'll turn into a festering wound so be careful about that try to face problems and difficulties head-on rather than trying to avoid them this avoidance behavior is really problematic it leads to a lot of neurosis and psychological dysfunction and that's what will happen if you live life improperly if you try to [ __ ] yourself if you try to lie to yourself if you try to deny things if you try to play manipulative games this will create a neurotic toxic psychology in you you're not gonna get away with it you see there's a cost to these things there's a cost to lying manipulating stealing cheating you're never gonna get away with these things and one of the worst things you can do is lying to yourself so I recommend as one of the core pillars of your foundation for life is that you make a commitment towards maximum radical self honesty you can [ __ ] others to a degree and get away with it but at least make the commitment to always be honest with yourself always be truthful with yourself because if you're not truthful with yourself what's gonna happen you're gonna [ __ ] yourself you're gonna deceive yourself and that's gonna take you in in the wrong direction in life consider if you don't know the truth about a situation and you have some false story about it then what do you got do you have what it really is do you have the substance of the thing you have the reality of it or do you have nothing you see when you think about that and you realize that if you don't have the truth about a situation what you have is you have literally have nothing because reality is what's true that's why truth is so powerful and truth is so important and this other piece of advice I have for you is take truth really seriously truth and honesty these are not merely things that you do for the benefit of others so that others don't get mad at you so it's not that you tell your mother the truth because if you didn't then she will ground you or something like that no no this is this is totally inadequate of an understanding of why truth is important truth is important because truth is what everything is and the only thing that there is truth is reality reality is all of the stuff that you see around you so if something isn't true it isn't real and if isn't real it isn't here and if it isn't here it's not in your experience and if it's not in your experience then it's nothing to you it doesn't exist literally so so ask yourself this for the rest of your life do you want to be on the side of truth or do you want to be on the side of playing games and bullshitting and deceiving yourself and deceiving others and lying to yourself in line to others which do you want to be on do you think you can create a life a good life based on deception manipulation falsehood denial suppression no in ignoring so I recommend you make a serious lifelong commitment to to really be committed to truth at all costs even when it's painful and that's that's the trick with truth is that to really make a serious commitment to truth it's like marriage it's like a it's a commitment more serious than marriage really because what it means is that I'm not going to be with you just in the good times I'm gonna be especially with you in the bad times that's what you're committing to so with the truth of course it's easy to love the truth when the truth serves you and the truth is on your side but you will discover and everybody does that at some point the truth will be against you the truth will not be in your survival interest the truth will cost you money the truth may cost you a friendship or a relationship the truth may may hurt may hurt you it may hurt somebody else might hurt their feelings might hurt their pocketbook it might lead to the collapse of a business it might lead you to losing a job being truthful and honest and in those moments you're gonna be tempted to to lie to manipulate to deceive to to not be fully truthful with others but even more importantly with yourself because you can't lie effectively to others without lying to yourself if you think that all just lied to my mom and I'll lie to my dad and I'll lie to my boss but with myself I'll be honest who are you kidding see now you're already lying to yourself you won't be able to maintain your lies to others without lying to yourself and there are so many things that you lie to yourself about there's so many deep levels to it see so a couple of other quick pillars that I'll give you here for your foundation is one pillars that life is deeply counterintuitive that's exactly how people fall into traps is that they think that oh this will work one way and it turns out that it works exactly the opposite you think at all well that heroin produces a nice pleasure or hi for me that and I can just keep do that every day and that's going to lead to happiness and then you find out no it's actually exactly the opposite or you think that oh logic I can just use logic to analyze all of reality and then all of a good life because emotions are bad and emotions are negative they get in the way well if you do that you'll find out actually it works exactly the opposite way you got to feel more another pillar I'll give you here is being proactive you can take sort of a lazy backseat approach to life where it's like you're in the in the backseat of the car and you're letting somebody else drive you or you can take a proactive approach which is what I recommend you do proactive approach means you want to be in the driver's seat and you will not stand for situations where people ask you to be in the in the backseat not when it comes to your own life now of course in other situations you can take a back seat but but when it comes to setting the direction of your own life you have to be proactive about that you have to be proactive going out there learning researching looking for things you're passionate about setting goals for yourself motivating yourself you know whatever that takes maybe visualization exercises or whatever to motivate yourself you know being proactive like this going above and beyond the bear minimum of life and this this applies to everything you do so if you're going to school be proactive in school that means you don't just do the bare minimum to pass the test or to get a C or even a B or even an A that's not good enough if you're truly proactive about learning you're not going to be satisfied with the learning that you get in school you're gonna want to read books on your own after you're done with homework then you pick up a book and just read whatever book you want that you're passionate about that's what proactivity looks like in school and at work you don't just go in there and to work and just do the job that your boss tells you to do you're proactive you have your own ideas and visions about how this job can be done better how you can help your boss more how the company might be better served by some other idea that you have that's what it means to be proactive at work and so on across the board throughout your whole life be proactive you're here you want to be engaged in life to be engaged in life you have to find something about it you enjoy and look at how much there is around you to enjoy of course there's there's dark stuff there's negative stuff I'm not I'm not being naive here there's a lot of darkness to life but even so there's still something you can find that you would really enjoy whether it's art music engineering design architecture history science spirituality sexuality so many things and really we're living in a time now that you can literally create a successful career in any of these fields the bottleneck towards your success your material success if we're talking about money in any field is going to be your passion if you want to be materially successful find something you're ridiculously passionate about you could pour thousands of hours into develop mastery in something that this is another pillar that I have for you you need to pick at least one or two things in your life that you will develop mastery in that you'll be working towards that doesn't mean you have to master it now it just means you pick a thing you're concrete about what that thing is and then you get to work mastering it and you slowly chip away at that on a daily weekly monthly yearly basis for decades so again this should be something you're deeply interested in passionate about and curious about it could be martial arts could be music could be film critique could be video game design could be web design could be calligraphy it could be yoga it could be weightlifting it could be science it could be astronomy it could be geology it could be hunting for dinosaurs it could be art it could be tailoring or sewing stuff like it really makes no difference as long as you enjoy it and you find some deeper meaning in it and you're constructing that meaning remember so you pick one or two of these fields and you develop skill in that because you want to become useful to mankind this is important because going back to that original thing about your job and your career and your sense of life purpose you see since you're gonna be working a third to a half of your life waking hours going towards work for you not to be struggling material in your life for you to have the kind of luxury and comfort and freedom that you want you know a decent place to live decent food the ability to send your kids to school or to college the ability to pay for your medical expenses stuff like this the ability to go travel do some this kind of stuff you want you don't need millions and millions of dollars but you want you want a decent salary how do you get a decent salary the only legitimate way to get a decent salary in society is to become useful to society in some way now you can become useful to society on its terms or on your terms if you do it on its terms that means that you know society tells you hey we need somebody to work at Starbucks pouring coffees we'll pay you ten bucks an hour here you go do this monotonous job for the next 20 years and we'll be paying you a minor wage with fairly crappy benefits and you could lose your job at anytime and you can do that that's that's on society's terms see because you were proactive enough you were passionate enough to go out there and really master something develop some serious valuable skill in something now the alternative scenario is that you become so passionate about something you spend years and years studying it exploring it developing skill and talent in it and then what happens is that you get so good at that thing that you're able to create and produce some original unique work that other people find valuable in society it could be music art film engineering schematics architectural schematics some business skills that you have that you're able to help somebody run their business so they hire you for that maybe some lawyer in skills some doctoring skills whatever the better you get the rarer you are compared to others around you the more valuable your skillset is the more people are willing to pay you to help them and to partake in whatever creative work that you're doing to view it to buy it to hire your services whatever and from this upon this foundation you can then build a relatively comfortable life for yourself with freedom and such that you never really have to worry about much about money at all whereas if you don't do that if you just do the default and by the way if you're not proud and you're not ambitious you won't get that if you just are lazy and you do the default what you'll get is still get the Starbucks example you'll have a boring monotonous job and if you if you get that then you'll be worrying and stressing about money for the rest of your life and also your opportunities for exploring reality will be severely limited because you won't have the freedom to take a vacation whenever you want you won't have the money to buy the kind of stuff you want that will help you to explore life see for me money is quite important not because I want a fancy car and the sorts of stuff although of course nothing wrong with that and you could enjoy some of those things to some degree but more importantly what you want is you want the freedom that money buys you money buys you the freedom to work on your own time to have a more flexible schedule to not have to be worried do not have to always take the worst available job just because you need it just because it pays you the money you know sometimes you can pass that up and go for a better job but to do that you need some money to hold you over the mean time money allows you to fund your ideas if you are entrepreneurial person you have some creative ideas you're gonna need money for that you're gonna need supplies you're gonna need equipment you're gonna maybe need time off of work to work on your personal projects and so forth I recommend that you're always working on some personal career related projects in your life even if you have a job traditional job have some career related projects that you're working on some music project some film project some engineering project whatever through these project is how you're going to develop and build your skills and your experience never ever ever let the phrase but I don't know how stop you from doing something or from attempting something if there's something you don't know how to do research it by books about it go to Google and type it in there read articles about find videos about it on YouTube ask friends about it ask people about it find the people who know how you don't need to know how to do anything in life all you need to have is you to have the desire and the clear intent that you want to do it from that everything else will be generated as if by magic and without that nothing will happen even if you know how to fly to the moon you're not gonna fly to the moon unless you have a deep ambition and desire to do it on the other hand if you have only an ambition and desire to fly to the moon and you have no idea how to do it you can still do it because you'll be able to use the ambition and a desire to figure out how to read to research to hire the people you need to to build you the stuff you need to get you to the moon imagine this that if right now if you're relatively young if you're in your 20s or your 30s and right now you set the intention in your mind that the most important thing for me in my life is that I'm gonna be on the moon I have no idea how I'm gonna do it I don't have the money I don't have the skills I don't have the engineering know-how all I know is that I want to be on the moon by the time my life is over if you set that intention for yourself I can almost guarantee that you will do it you will find some way to do it that doesn't mean you're gonna build your own rocket ship or maybe you will but it could mean that you become a Wall Street stockbroker earn yourself a bunch of money earned yourself a billion dollars like Warren Buffett or something in the stock market and then use that money to build yourself a rocket ship that's what you would do if you really desire to get to the moon now of course most people have no such desires so it never happens it's really that simple like it's not theirs again it's desires not a binary thing like I desire it or I don't know no there's many many degrees of desire how much do you desire something and then how ambitious are you about it I should the next point I want to make is that it's very important that you understand that human beings are different it's gonna seem to you for the first 20 or 30 years of your life at least that human beings are very similar you're gonna look at human beings as though they are copies of you it's gonna seem that they feel like you they behave like you they look like you it takes a while it takes a good 30 years or so of observing people to start to notice the important distinctions and differences between people so what you what I want you to understand about people really quickly is the following thing if you observe if you just go to a shopping mall or a crowded area and you observe people walking around at Walmart or something and just sit there and people watch for half an hour observe people's physical appearances only pay attention to how their bodies are different if you sit there you do that for half an hour what you will see is how seriously different people's bodies are you're gonna see short people tall people skinny people fat people really really fat people you're gonna see white people black people Asian people Indian people Somali people African people you're gonna see disabled people you're gonna see people that are beautiful ugly and somewhere in the middle you're gonna see people with lots of pimples you're gonna see people who are lots of moles you're gonna see some people walking funny you're gonna see some people with only one arm or only one leg some will be in wheelchairs some will be old some will be young some will be in the middle some will be really really old some will be just little infants some will have gigantic breasts some will have no breasts and everything in between some will have weird colored hair tattoos and piercings and all this sort of stuff others won't it will also of course all be dressed differently some will be dressed real nice some will be dressed like like homeless people and everything in between so you observe all that that's you observing the person from the outside now I want you to translate that lesson to what's going on on their inside their mind so the most important point here is not that people are different externally physically what's more important is that people are different internally in their minds so the key mistake and traffic that is made here is that because we can't see the mind we tend to assume that well yeah physically it's hard to deny physical differences you know there's a man there's a woman they're obviously different ones black ones white ones fat ones skinny whatever very clear but we can't so clearly look into a person's mind so what we do for the first 30 or 40 years of our life is we sort of project our own mind into others and we tend to assume that well if if I am introverted then that person must be introverted or if I like going to a party then everyone likes going to parties or if I like being a doctor then most people should like being doctors and and so on this is not the case this is not the case in fact people are so different in their minds that consider the following possibility this is a radical possibility is that imagine that your mind is so different Rembert like I said the mind and physical reality at a deep level metaphysically are actually interconnected they're not separate things people's minds are so different that it's almost as though they're living in different realities now of course our realities interpenetrate which is why we can all stop at the same stoplight and not crash into each other our realities are coherent and consistent in that way but there are other ways in which our realities are not where they're individuated we might say and so this is the point I want to emphasize here is really try to understand that people have different personalities different genetics different brain chemistry different ideologies and software that is running their mind a different operating system sometimes you're talking to somebody it seems it's really it's like physically you two might look even close and similar but internally the software that you're running is so different that it's like communicating between a Mac and a Windows PC or even like a Linux or even something totally alien and sometimes like talking to an alien you're just not on the same page at all people have different levels of ambition different levels of motivation different fear profiles what they're afraid of different degrees of neurosis and trauma they experienced in their past different energy levels different moods some are more happy some are more depress some are more positive someone more negative optimistic pessimistic whatever somewhat introverted some are extroverted different personality types people are at different stages of development different levels of consciousness and sometimes they even have different access to different aspects of reality they don't see the same things that you or I see of course we like to lock some of those people up in now in mental institutions but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's something's wrong with them it just might mean that they're different and you might be one of those people you might be different so the reason I'm telling you this is first of all when you recognize how different people's minds are that helps you to again really try to customize life to yourself because what works for somebody else does not necessarily work for you you can't just assume that that would be true if if everyone's minds are the same but that's not the case also that advice isn't the same for everybody some advice will work for some types of minds but not other types of minds this also helps you to to start to turn inwards more and to honor your own self and to really question yourself deeper because life is not just a process of exploring external reality and other people it's a process of exploring your own self because you don't really know who you are and I don't mean in the Enlightenment sense I mean you don't know who you are as a personality as an ego you don't know who you are you don't know what kind of food you like when you start life you don't know what kind of sex you like you don't know what kind of marriage or children you would like to have or whether you would like to have them at all you don't know what kind of career you'd like to have you don't know what kind of school you'd like to go to and what kind of country you'd like to live in what kind of weather you like you don't know these things until you go through a deep process of discovering yourself at a personality level and that's what the first few decades of your life are spent doing after you're an adult you're your 20s and your 30s you're really in a deep process of discovering yourself as a personality and this is a very important process a lot of people skip over this process and they skip over all of my advice in general and instead what they do is they they waste their time falling into the trap of entertainment or just going with the flow of what society the latest trends in society which is usually low consciousness lowbrow type of stuff which now leads me to very important to a very important point that connects back with the idea of ideology and belief systems so you were born into a culture whatever culture learn a country you're in whatever era you're living in this culture has been programming you in indoctrinating you literally indoctrinating you with beliefs desires fears philosophies attitudes ideologies since you were born and if you're listening to this at age 15 or age 20 or age 25 something like that you're still young but your mind has already been programmed by 10 15 or 20 years of this programming of your culture and this has already deeply screwed up your ability to understand reality so a significant well the most significant challenge you'll be dealing for the rest of your life if you really want understand reality in yourself is the epistemic challenge of figuring out what's true and what isn't and deconstructing all of the programming that you received during the first 20 years of your life through your childhood and through your education basically through the first 12 years and if you went to college then college as well that is like the foundation that is set for you but that foundation comes from your culture and any limits or bottlenecks or falsehoods or deceptions or lies within your culture are gonna get programmed into you in fact not only will that happen it's already happened but you don't know what all those are so in the process of discovering yourself you're gonna have to shed layer upon layer of all the false programming and conditioning that you've been programed with that is keeping you from living a free open life you see the way human development works it's very very delicate and fragile especially during the first 20 years of a humans development because when you come into this life as a baby you're so fragile that any sort of shock to your system very early on in life will have a cascading effect and cause you to become very dysfunctional for the rest of your life if you have a bad mother who abuses you or a father who molest see or something like that that will deeply traumatize you but don't think that trauma is just something that happens you know in rare instances of horrible neglect or family abuse basically all of us in a certain sense grew up in dysfunctional families to various degrees now granted some of them were extremely dysfunctional others only minorly dysfunctional but still there were many layers of dysfunction in your family because whatever dysfunction your parents had they transferred it on to you they couldn't help themselves that's how dysfunction works because your dysfunction infects your interaction with others so what happened was is that you received various kinds of traumas throughout the first five 10 15 years of your life especially incidents with your parents maybe you were bullied at school maybe people made fun of you sometimes it's minor stuff it can literally be you know you in school and somebody just laughs at you or pulls your pants down in front of the class something like that and that that event can traumatize you you know it's not a really serious event just really nothing in the grand scheme of things but something that can traumatize you and it can leave you afraid of being social with others it can leave you resentful or jealous or depressive or neurotic in some other way and so the reason that I bring up this trauma business is because almost all of us have it to some degree some of us have it very badly some of it have us some of us have it moderately almost none of us have it minorly moderate you should probably assume you have moderate amount of trauma this trauma is often repressed swept under the rug forgotten and it seems like it's not a very big part of your life now you know once you're 30 40 50 you might have forgotten all about it but actually it's a big deal it's very very deep within your subconscious deep within the foundations of your operating system of your mind and even deeper really at the kernel level so the earlier you receive the trauma the closer to the curdle of your operating system it's going to be the later in your life like if you got some trauma in your 20s or 30s it's still a problem but it's gonna be more towards the surface level not so deep the deeper the trauma the harder it is to heal the more surface level the easier it is to move past so the reason I bring this up this trauma business is because that trauma is gonna be like a weight around your shoulder on your neck dragging you down for the rest of your life so one of the most important things I recommend you do in order to free yourself and to really start to go deep in life and be passionate about life because the trauma will prevent you from being able to be passion in life is you're gonna have to heal yourself of that trauma now that's a tricky thing to explain how to do I don't have time to explain all here I'll have separate episodes about that in the future but I'll just say this the deeper it is the the deeper the work will have to be you can work with a psychotherapist you can use psychedelics to heal that trauma you can just do introspection and contemplation or journaling by yourself you can heal it by talking it out with an intimate partner I mean there's a lot of different ways that you can heal that trauma there's there's people you can hire who you can work with to help you with that stuff coaches even psychics and so forth can help you to deal with with that trauma and get over it and to have you face it and confront it but this is very very important for you to do especially if you had a good dose of it because you grew up in some dysfunctional family in some dysfunctional part of the world you know this functional families exist everywhere they exist in functional and dysfunctional parts of the world so don't confuse those two things so be honest with yourself ask yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how much trauma do I think I had in the first 15 or 20 years of my life this trauma could have been physical could have been emotional could have been verbal could have been fights you got into with your siblings or with your parents it could have been financial maybe you grew up in crippling poverty that created trauma for you or maybe even just mild poverty it could be because your dad or your mom went to jail it could be because you got arrested when you were a teen for doing something stupid you know whatever it could be because you got bullied at school or you bullied others at school you were picked on you were laughed on you became embarrassed basically whenever you weren't in some way approved of or loved you got trauma something that shocked you or scared you and denied you the love and acceptance that you should have gotten that's what creates trauma this trauma then creates a sort of a neediness and then you're gonna spend the rest of your life trying to get that thing that you've been desperately craving which is love in that specific form that you wanted it might be sexual it might be financial it might be you want Fame because your mother didn't love you so now you want to become famous as a compensating sort of force or your your family was poor and your dad wasn't able to afford to buy you the kind of shoes you wanted so then when you grew up now you're gonna be spending the rest of your life chasing money or maybe you were picked on in school and bullied and now you're gonna spend the rest of your life being an [ __ ] towards others who remind you of those bullies stuff like that this becomes very dysfunctional neurotic and it robs you of the passion and the clarity you need to be able to pursue reality deeper to understand reality deeper to live look deeper so again remember don't let the how to question prevent you from resolving a problem so if you have some of this trauma and you're thinking right now well but Leo how I don't know how you didn't tell me how to fix my trauma how do I do it it doesn't matter how just understand that you need to resolve it and then set the desire and the ambition that this is something that I'm gonna resolve because I'm not gonna let this thing weigh me down and cause me to to not fulfill on my amazing life that I'm building for myself I'm not gonna let some trauma get in the way of that I'm gonna find the expert that I need to heal me I'm gonna find the books or watch the right videos or take the courses or hire the professionals that I need or maybe I'll even just figure it out myself you can do that too grab a journal and start contemplating and you can figure it out you get at the bottom of it but anyways enough about that now since we're running out of time here I really want to get to the core of the advice that I have for you so we've covered a lot of sort of practical stuff by this point what are we kind of Luke are a lot of career we covered a lot of taking responsibility and being proactive and having motivation and passion this is all good as a study have a foundation we talked about learning we talked about understanding reality we talked about truth and honesty all great stuff we still haven't really touched upon health very quickly let me touch upon the pillar of health when you're young it's easy to take your health for granted but as you get older health becomes more and more of a challenge so I talked about how your culture imprints you with a bunch of bad conditioning that you're gonna have to undo and deconstruct one of those is health and one of the biggest traps your culture will throw you in unless you're careful is they will they will feed you garbage and poison they will toxify your brain and make it such that it's going to be difficult for you to properly use your mind and also it's going to be difficult for you to feel properly into your body because you're going to be so overweight and overfilled with toxins and and chemicals so what I recommend for you at a very high level here is learn about proper nutrition go buy some books about how to eat healthy and start to look carefully at the kind of food that you're eating our culture right now in our society is quite dysfunctional and quite toxic and it's very commercialized which means the food you get at restaurants in fat fast food places this is not high quality organic food it's made to be the saltiest sugar iasts unhealthiest food that is the cheapest to produce and tastes the best right but if you fall into this trap of eating at these restaurants and at this fast-food and eating all this junk food potato chips and cheese burgers at McDonald's and Coca Cola and candy and various soft drinks and cake and you know hot pockets and all this sorts of stuff Pizza if this is your diet you are not going to be able to fulfill on living an amazing life it's just it's it's gonna catch up with you and it's gonna turn into a glass ceiling for you so I would take precautions I would read some books about nutrition basically focus on eating Whole Foods vegetables fruits high quality meats and fats yes it costs more but you need that raw fuel raw clean fuel in order to do everything else in your life you're gonna need those energy levels you need to keep your energy levels high you're gonna need to keep your brain functioning well speaking of which drink purified high quality water don't consume products and foods that might contain heavy metals like mercury and lead there's really good research now that shows that actually getting lead and mercury in to your brain results in rising criminality rates in populations it's it's quite bad in the 1970s and 80s in the United States we had very high crime rates and the reason we had such high crime rates they discovered is that actually they passed some regulations which improved the environment environmental pollutants basically companies chemical companies were no longer allowed to just dump pollution into like lead and Mercury and stuff into rivers and and and lakes and into our food supply and that and then we saw in the 1990s after that legislation took effect and there were some regulations on those industries we saw that the crime rates fell and not much really change society except that now there was lower lead concentrations and in babies and children's brains so take that stuff seriously as you go forward and you want to reach the deepest levels of understanding you're gonna need a very clear mind you're gonna need to be able to focus you're not gonna be able to do that when you have a bunch of chemicals and and toxic stuff that that you polluted your brain and your body with over ten or twenty or thirty years of eating junk food and drinking dirty water and this sort of stuff so you need that basic foundation also recommend you learn to exercise a bit as well whether it's weight lifting or cardio or a combination of the above or yoga or whatever okay so we got that now let's move on to the most important the most important piece of advice I have for you now we're gonna get metaphysical and a bit spiritual okay and we can't help it because in the end life is a metaphysical and spiritual thing so here we go reality is not a physical system like I alluded to in the past its consciousness everything that you see or experience is consciousness different levels gradations and layers of consciousness consciousness is a very complex thing and the way that you understand consciousness is by experiencing it and by being conscious of it who'da thunk see my body is man of consciousness this video if you're watching it on YouTube is made of consciousness if you're listening this to this as an audio the audio waves that you're hearing a man of consciousness your ears are made of consciousness your brain is made of consciousness everything is made out of consciousness why is this so important you might wonder you might say well Lea what's the difference whether it's consciousness or its atoms what's the difference there's an enormous difference because if reality is made of atoms then that makes it seem as though reality is separate and distant from you again it feels like you're falling in that scientific trap of like there's the object and there's the subject and the subject is separate from the object that means I'm over here and I'm looking at the atoms over there but that's not your experience of reality your experience of realities that you're meshed in with it this physical room you're sitting in is a part of your head there's no boundary between it and you this is very important because this opens up a totally radical new possibility because if reality was separate from you external to you then there's always a sort of a boundary or a veil through which you can never pierce to get to the root bottom of reality maybe you can look at reality through a microscope but you need a microscope and even then you're just looking at some atoms and it doesn't really reveal much about reality to you but remember our number one priority is to understand reality and the deeper we understand it the better we are able to live because reality is all that there is so if you don't understand it you'll be living poorly and if you do understand it you'll be living splendidly so to live the most splendid life you want understand reality the deepest level and to do that you need to understand that it's all consciousness and you need once this possibility once you grasp this possibility once you grasp it the object and the subject are actually interconnected that means that you now have direct access to reality itself reality is not hidden from you you're able to access it because it's all consciousness just different levels of consciousness and so the number one key to living a good life is to be more conscious and to raise your level of consciousness and there are many levels and different degrees and states of consciousness right now you happen to be in one state when you're sleeping you're another state when you're dreaming you're in another state when you're sexually aroused you're in another state when you're drunk on alcohol you're in another state and so on reality is infinite states of consciousness that's all that it is but it's very important to what kind of states you're in you can be in some very bad states very contracted states and you can meet some very good states very expansive states the more conscious you become the more understanding you have of how everything truly is the less conscious you are the more you're sort of in a daze the more you're a zombie the more you're sleepwalking through life the more you lie to yourself the more you manipulate the more selfish you are the more fearful you are the more petty you are and this now leads us to sort of the key challenge of life is that really life is about two forces fear versus love those are the two forces but I'll also phrase it this way it's about selfishness versus selflessness this is what all of life boils down to had a metaphysical level and really when I say metaphysical I also mean physical sometimes people hear the word metaphysical and they think oh that's some blue New Age stuff no no no we're talking physics here basically your life is run by fear and love all of humanity is run by fear of love and so is the entire universe this is not what science will teach you but science like I said is operating under a false materialistic paradigm so in your life I want you to really deeply notice that you're either afraid of things and you're doing things out of fear or you're doing things out of love now love is the complex notion I'm not gonna explain it fully here I have in the past in other episodes you can look for those but uh you know we talk a lot about passion and desire and ambition what do you think that is what do you think desire is when you connect with the miracle that your life is what do you think that is that's love we talked about trauma when you don't get the love that you needed from your parents your mother especially but also your father your siblings your friends your co-workers your teachers your students and all that when you don't get enough love what happens is that you recoil and you go into fear and that creates trauma creates dysfunction it makes you needy and then that sabotages your whole life so if you want to know why you're here and what life is really about life is a training ground to teach you how to love and how to be selfless and these are difficult things to learn learning these things requires going through great struggle and suffering falling into many traps and much trial and error so what reality is what the universe is it's not just some stupid physical system that exists randomly because of some Big Bang and some molecules bouncing around and then just there happened to be a planet Earth and there happened to be some apes who evolved into some humans it's not that the entire system has been designed by consciousness so that consciousness can teach itself what it is which is love and so that I can explore different ways in which love gets expressed and how love gets manifested and actualized and of course fear is just an absence of love so it's not like fear and love are two polar opposite forces it's actually one thing you could call it fear - love fear is love of a very contracted sort and love is of course love fully expanded without any fear so think of it like light if we have a dimmer switch here for this room I could tune it down and the lights come down until it becomes totally dark that would be absolute fear terror if you were if you were if you encountered you know a grizzly bear in the woods that dimmer switch would go all the way to black you'd be so scared especially if he was chasing you down and then if now if we tune this dimmer switch upwards then that moves us more towards brightness more and more light and more and more light is just more and more love you see so the reason it's important understand that everything is consciousness is because when you think everything is atoms the way science tells you when you think that way then it seems like well but love how does love fit into a physical reality because physical reality is over here it's a bunch of atoms and my mind is over here I'm the subject and I experience love these are feelings these are like girly emotional feelings love is just a feeling and so it seems like these two things are separated and it seems like now olio you're talking about love but that's just some hippy dippy woowoo [ __ ] then there's physical reality that's more primary this is this is what's real this is fluffy stuff that's under the materialist paradigm but when you realize and acknowledge that this here is consciousness and everything is consciousness when you understand that now it becomes a lot easier to understand that love can be a fundamental feature of reality because reality never was some molecules or atoms it was consciousness technically the molecules and atoms that scientists study they are consciousness consciousness is dreaming up molecules and atoms it's also dreaming up scientists and science and it's dreaming up the entire universe the entire universe is not a physical object the entire universe is a giant infinite mind of unlimited imaginary potential which means that life is imaginary that's right you're at a dream and even though you're in a dream and I'm just a figment of your own dream never the life that's nevertheless life is still serious it's still the realest thing there is because there's no alternative to the dream therefore you've contributed the dream for reality now I don't want to get too bogged down into the sort of the philosophy and metaphysics of this the reason I bring this up is just to help ground the notion of fear and love so this is actually very practical in your life every single day you're fearing fear you're feeling fear and you're feeling love and you're sort of getting tugged in either direction by these different forces and the quality of your life is going to hinge upon how much you give it to the fear versus how much you pursue the love pursuing the love is difficult but then again like I said consciousness being a giant infinite universal mind what else is it here to do it's got nothing else to do but to explore different ways of loving itself you see consciousness can either be in love with itself or it can recoil from itself when you see something nasty or ugly or vicious or evil quote-unquote evil you recoil that's consciousness recoiling at it's own self your job in this life is to learn to love life more and more and more and more and more especially those things that recoil you to love them more and more and more until eventually you can become completely unconditionally loving or at least try to approach that as much as you can and to do that that requires becoming more and more and more selfless which is the opposite of selfish so the more selfish you are in life the worse your life will be the more selfless you are in life the better your life will be and this is one of the most counterintuitive things because simplistically it seems like well but if I live my life selfishly that sounds like a good strategy right because like I'll be selfish and all I'll hoard myself a bunch of money and I'll be selfish and I'll just you know be manipulative in my relationships and I'll be selfish I'll just lie to people in order to get them to do what I want and I'll be selfish and I'll just to take all the good food and leave none none for everybody else but I will get it and when I get it I get all the pleasure and all the everything comes to me so if everything is coming to me then that's what life is about right life is all about attracting everything that I want the most pleasurable stuff to me and then that's the height of life that's what it seems like and then what you discover after maybe 30 40 50 years of trying that is that it's exactly the opposite life the quality of your life is about how much love you can radiate out to others to the point where you love so much there's nothing left of you you've given all of yourself away now I don't mean doing this in a neurotic sense where some women do this in a relationship where they they try to please the man try to please the husband over and over bend over backwards for the husband and and then and whatever the husband abuses them and they still bend over backwards and they keep pleasing the husband night I'm not talking about this abusive wife syndrome that's a neurotic form of love I'm talking about giving and radiating love on your terms so remember I talked about passion and what do you want to do with your life you've been given this miracle of life and really the question that so-to-speak God has put to you now is this one how do you want to radiate love you've been given this opportunity and now God is telling you like this okay show me what you got show me what you can do we've got consciousness here we've got this amazing world that I've created for you all this stuff that you can do you can go out there you can be a murderer you can be a thief you can be a dirty politician you can be a crook you can be some Wall Street broker you can be a doctor you can be a mother Teresa you can be a saint you can be a Jesus you can be a Buddha you can you know you can make money you can have children you can make a family you can make music and games and you can be an engineer you can be you can do anything you can go to the moon out of all these things what are you gonna choose to do all of these things are different manifestations of love some are low manifestations some are very high manifestations how are you gonna manifest your love how godlike are you willing to be and what God like means is simply selfless and loving if you were ever to become infinitely selfless and infinitely loving you would become God and to the extent that you're not is the extent to which you're still God but you are lost within the lower realms of consciousness you're not conscious enough to see why you should be selfless and why the smartest and wisest most intelligent choice and path in life is the most selfless and loving one see you can't see that yet because you're not conscious enough of it yet and the only way it can become more conscious of it is by living through life and going through this trial and error process and suffering through it and it's the suffering that will teach you how to be more loving and how to be more selfless so if you really want the best life possible try to understand what I'm telling you here try to notice that it's true and commit to being as loving and selfless as you can be on your terms not in a dysfunctional neurotic way you're not being loving and selfless because you want to live up to some image of being a saint and you're not being loving and selfless because you're gonna do that for somebody else so that they can repay you even more you see cuz that's actually a hidden form of selfishness that's in a sense what the what the wife is doing the abusive wife is doing what the husband is that she is actually trying to to please him overly much even though he's abusing her and she keeps doing that because she needs him and there's a sort of a codependency there and if he breaks up with her she's gonna suffer and she doesn't to go through that so see in that sense it's not really it's not genuine love that's a neurotic form of love that comes from past childhood traumas and so forth what I'm talking about is just a pure radiation of yourself of your personality of how you want to live of how you want to use your body how do you want to use your your your creativity your god-given talents in all of this I'd like to say that life is like a sandbox game it's not like one of those linear games like Call of Duty or one of those Mario side-scrollers you know Mario side-scroller you're just scrolling in one direction the whole time there's no choice in you know where you go every obstacle is already pre-designed preset life is more like Sim City or minecraft where you're just thrown into this into this matrix of possibility and you get to decide which which things you want to actualize and you can be a good person you can be a cruel person you can be a manipulative person you can be a generous person you can be highly creative you can be a great lover you can you can raise beautiful children or you can do the opposite of those things you know you can abuse your children you can beat your children you can be a terrible lover you can be a needy lover you can be demanding and exploitative and abusive and all the sorts of stuff and there's no judgement in it there's no good or bad because remember all meaning is created by you it's an experiment in creativity that's literally why life is an experiment in creativity not just life but the entire universe it's an explosion of creativity so I recommend that you don't fall into the trap of judging what is being created around you don't waste time judging others criticizing others don't waste time judging yourself or criticizing yourself simply focus on what you want to create and try to radiate as much love as you can stomach and then when you find that you're not able to stomach anymore because you've hit your limit then you ask yourself what how can I love even more because I've hit my limit how can I raise my limit that's the question you ask and when you ask that question and then you don't know how and you say but but how I don't know how and then you remember oh yeah Leo told me I don't need to know how all I need to have is the desire the passion the ambition for it and then what you realize that I don't need to know how to love I just know I need to know that I want to love and so you set that desire and that intention very clearly to be selfless to be godlike and then you work towards that and then you do the research and you attract the people and the circumstances the books and the videos and courses and professional help that you need that will help you to be more loving to raise your ceiling for love and selflessness and you keep doing that and doing that and doing that and doing that and doing that until you've aced life tada that's how you live the good life and that in a nutshell is what spirituality is about now let me make a few final remarks about spirituality because spirituality is a very problematic topic filled with even more traps than all the other topics so many traps within spirituality the biggest trap of course is ideology and belief like we've already said your culture has about a bunch of preconceived notions about how reality works in what spirituality is and most of them are wrong so the only way that you're really going to deeply understand the things that I'm sharing with you here because this is advanced advice this is not advice that you're gonna hear almost anywhere else in society or in your culture so it took me 20 years of hard labor and brutal trial and error a lot of suffering went into discovering this advice to the point where I can I can just give it to you off the cuff here this is off the cuff advice I didn't take any notes just off top my head here the only reason I'm able to give this advice to use because I've went through hell to to figure this out because I really wanted to figure it out and I finally figured it out and it's possible to figure it out believe it or not but in order to do so you have to really be careful with how your mind tricks you and you have to deconstruct all of your beliefs about reality and all your ideologies and you have to be completely and radically open-minded and you have to derive all of this for yourself you're not gonna be able to go read some Bible and get this sort of depth of understanding even listening to this video you might say well but Leo I got all the info I got all the answers right here you gave me all the answers assuming they're right let's just assume for a second they're right if they're all right you still haven't really gotten the answers because like I said before you have to derive the answers for yourself it's helpful for me to tell you this stuff but I went through 20 years to derive these answers for myself so the effect these answers have on me is very different than the effect they have on you you have not gone through those 10 or 20 years yet so you're gonna have to go through that process so I recommend you get started and if you're wondering well Leo but what if you're trying to trick me or what if you're deluded or how do I even know any of this advice is good what if some of this advice is bad well here's my advice about that of course you shouldn't believe me if I was asking you to believe me or to turn this into an ideology then that would just be the ideology or belief trap I'm suggesting something very different I'm suggesting you test this through trial and error over the next 10 or 20 years and hey if you don't want to start with my ideas go read some other books or pick up some other ideas but you got to start somewhere when you're doing testing or experimentation and this is true of how science works you have to start somewhere so where you gonna start well you start with your best intuition of where you think is the best place to start with so hopefully if your intuitive and you have a good mind then the stuff that I said here will resonate with that intuition and you will you will realize that this is a very good place to start by following this advice but if you aren't wise enough to see that by all means go follow other advice go shoot yourself up with some heroin or go have a bunch of sex or go buy yourself a Ferrari you know whatever you got to do experiment with life in the end it's a trial and error process see and that's why you shouldn't judge people because they're just they're just exploring reality some of them are exploring it in stupid ways but then again how else do you learn but doing stupid things so because consciousness is all there is and this is consciousness and everything is consciousness you have direct access to reality and to truth at all times right now right here you're directly connected with it reality and truth is not somewhere hidden behind the veil or curtain of of perception perception and appearance is consciousness is reality this is it you have direct access to it you are it so don't underestimate how deeply you can understand yourself you can understand yourself totally infinitely in fact that's what I suggest you try to do is gain infinite self understanding and see where that leads you it's possible because you are conscious you are conscious right now and that consciousness is everything that there is there's different levels of it though you have to train your mind to access those other levels how again you can always do research to find out how right now we're more concerned about why and developing the desire in you to do so to want to do so direct experience is king that's one of my principles direct experience is king you right now are experiencing reality experience notice is all that you have of reality you don't have anything else can you name me one thing that you have a reality that has not been experienced by you try name one thing that you have not experienced which is real you can't anything real you have experienced because reality is experience look turn within and look these are not things I'm asking you to believe you don't believe me and take on as an ideology that direct experiences King you test it in your direct experience and see what's going on can you invalidate it try of course it's tricky because your mind can always trick you your mind can always tell you that oh yeah there is something besides experience there's reality behind the experience well that's part of the work is is it's noticing how your own mind tricks you and how you get you know sucked into these various kinds of philosophical metaphysical traps and epistemic traps so you do have to be very careful you have to practice observation meditation you have to be aware you have to turn inwards self reflect introspect question deeply contemplate I have videos and episodes covering all those different topics and how to do them and you can find books that have been written about this and so forth but in the end everything I said here it has no truth or no validity to it unless you validate it for yourself in your direct experience so really all that I'm suggesting you do is I suggest that you turn your life into a scientific investigation into a scientific experiment and the of your experiment is to simply figure out what is reality what is consciousness what is life and how do I live the good life how do I live the best life possible these are the four or five key questions you need and as long as you're deeply curious about these questions and you contemplate them every day and you really desire answers to them that's really enough from that you will be able to derive everything else that I said here might take you 20 30 40 years you'll have to go through hell to do it the way that I did but eventually you'll do it and hey what else is there to do with life have you got a better plan have you got a better idea what are you gonna do are you gonna spend the next 10 20 years work at some dead-end job coming back home dead tired turning on Netflix and sitting there crashing for three hours falling asleep then doing it over the next day and doing that over and over and over again until you're dead until you're fat until you're 50 pounds overweight until you hate your life until you're miserable until you're numb until you can barely feel your own body anymore you're stuck in your logical mind and this is what your life becomes are you gonna be lazy with your life are you gonna be proactive are you gonna treat it like the miracle that it is or are you gonna numb that out of your mind by watching TV or browsing online endlessly through social media I think a lot of people simply don't take life seriously and I don't mean seriously in the sense that like a lot of people go and be serious about becoming a lawyer or a doctor or there'll be serious about starting a business and earn lots of money I don't mean that that that to me that's still not serious I mean there there are many people who are so unserious they just work at Starbucks and watch Netflix then there's a little bit more serious people who actually start businesses and become doctors and lawyers and then there's the really serious people they're really serious people are the ones who are metaphysically serious that means they're actually serious about questioning consciousness itself and how you got here and what you're doing here and actually trying to figure out life these are the philosophers they are the really serious ones now of course there's a lot of [ __ ] philosophers as well but when you do philosophy right when you really deeply conte contemplate in question reality it's not a mental masturbation exercise the way that some people think it produces genuine results so when I started doing philosophy when I was about 16 or 17 years old many people around me like when I told them that I enjoy philosophy they would say oh a philosophy that's some that's some airy-fairy [ __ ] that's not practical that's not useful my parents would tell me that they would make fun of me various friends and and and and sort of colleagues that I had would also treat philosophy in this very dismissive way it's like Oh philosophy is just some some ancient Greek [ __ ] that they did thousands of years ago that doesn't work any or there's no point to it is just like an intellectual exercise right no in 20 years I use philosophy to completely unravel the entire mystery of the universe and I've completely figured it out now of course I still have more to do I'm not gonna be so arrogant as to say that my work is done there's still a ton of work ahead of me but I've reached the point where like literally it's I mean it sounds arrogant to say but I've reached the point where I've completely figured out the universe that's possible I mean and and all that it required was a utterly radically open mind and enough curiosity and passion and the desire to do it like to me that was the point of life there was no other point in life other than figuring it out everything else was a was a fun distraction nice little sideshow I of course I did all that stuff you know this is the sex the money the business yeah I did I did that and I'm still doing that to some degree and it's it's fun and all that but this is all a sideshow I was serious about life very early on and I would suggest as my final advice to use get serious about life get metaphysically serious about life figure out what life is figure out why you're here figure out what it's all about these are not aimless questions that have no answers and this is not just purely subjective speculation was like oh yeah well Leo says life is about love but somebody else says life is about this and somebody else thinks about that is some Christian person says this no no you can actually get to the absolute truth of the matter you can get to the bottom of what life is about and I hope one day you do all right that's it for me here I hope you like this life advice I try to make it practical but also profound of course we we've only scratched the surface I might have to do a part two here we've covered a lot we've we've built a nice little foundation mmm there's still so much advice that I could give to you but I have to cut it off at some point we're already past two hours just ask guys as a final warning I'll just tell you the biggest obstacle for you doing this is going to be your culture and the beliefs and ideologies that it's programmed you with you're gonna have to do some very very deep inner introspection to deconstruct all of that to free your mind to jailbreak your mind and you're gonna have to overcome not just your cultures programming but your own internal self deceptions see my three part series about self deception mechanisms you have to overcome all of your own personal self deceptions in order to to fully actualize what I'm saying here but but then again that's why I'm here that's why I hope my work is here is to help you to do that alright so that's that's the end please click the like button for me come check out actually that's my website you can find the life purpose course which will help you to find your life purpose it's over 25 hours explaining how I found my life purpose and how you can find yours that will address a really big pillar of this foundation which is getting that passion into place specifically around your career and mastery so that's life purpose course it's all by the way it's exclusive content so the stuff that you find in a life purpose course is completely original completely brand new stuff that I haven't talked about on my channel or anywhere else right so it's it's it's worth the price of admission check out my book list the book list by the way is also a great resource that gives you hundreds of some of the highest quality resources that I've used to figure out how how to do this stuff how to answer these questions I had these questions these top burning questions in my mind that I mentioned of like you know what is life how to live the good life and what is conscious I've had these tough questions and so I found hundreds of books and I read hundreds of books that gave me good clues as to where to look now of course I didn't just read these books and believe what they said I read the books and then I verified everything there for myself and that's what I recommend you do is that you verify all this stuff for yourself test it see if it's true so check out the book list check out my blog I post exclusive videos and content on the blog and if you'd like you could support me on patreon by going to patreon.com slash actualised where you can chip in five bucks a month or something like that and that supports me and gives me a little bit more funding to do more of my basic expand my work in the future which I will probably be doing and I appreciate those donations that's it now some final concluding thought just so complex and massive life is so massive that one of the challenges with explaining how life really works is that our culture these days is so shallow everything is broken down into five second sound bites or five minute segments between commercials and and stuff like that that it's rare in our culture to find deep content that actually is metaphysically serious you see our culture is not metaphysically serious our news is not our entertainment is not our schools are not our TV programs are not it's almost the opposite of that it's it's like they're there it's almost like they're deliberately metaphysically flimsy it's like they deliberately avoid acknowledging the the fact that we exist it's not existential nothing in our culture is is existential it's all a distraction from that it's all surface novel stuff so one of the things that originally excited me about starting this channel actualized org and creating this deep catalogue of video content the thing that inspired me to do this was that I saw the potential I had a vision of the potential that this catalog of content has for going and taking people deep I want to actualize it work to be something different something unique that you couldn't find almost anywhere in society metaphysically serious self-improvement advice it's practical but it's also profound it really gets you to the kernel to the kernel of reality to the kernel of your operating system a lot of self-help advices is frivolous stuff how to earn a little bit of money how to have better sex how to be nicer to your husband how to have raise good kids how to do I give some of this advice and it's nice but it never it's never enough that kind of advice is never gonna be enough it's not gonna fundamentally change anything about your life it's not gonna answer the deep question of why are you here what's really going on and how to live the good life for that you need an understanding at the kernel level which was why we spend a lot of time covering foundational topics which seem like they're irrelevant or a pract impractical stuff about epistemology and metaphysics and spirituality and so forth sometimes it seems like it's all not really relevant to your life but I promise you it is it's just a question of how deep you want to go the deeper or the rather I guess the the the way to say it is uh the taller you want to build your skyscraper the deeper you have to dig the foundation and if you want the tallest skyscraper you need the deepest foundation so that's what we're doing here I recommend you stick around keep watching and take this material seriously take it as though you've discovered the Holy Grail here not because I'm the best or something but just because truly honestly where else are you gonna find a resource of content a catalogue of content that breaks down life at the level that I break it down at you're not gonna find this almost anywhere else both in terms of its depth but also breadth I try to do both you see a lot of a lot of teachers they'll either take you wide but they won't take you deep or they'll take you deep but very very narrow and here we try to do both and hard to do it's like trying to swallow an elephant all at once it's so big it's so epic like all I can say in conclusion is that it's so worth it this work is so worth it understanding reality truly understanding reality not as an ideology not as a belief system not as some cultural artifact - really independently investigate and understand reality for what it is and how it works it's so [ __ ] incredible it's so ingenious it's so beautiful you won't regret it it's going to be a lot more work than you ever thought but the payoff is going to be infinite you